Mississippi Blues

Origins of the blues – The origin of the term was most likely derived from mysticism involving blue indigo, which was used by many West African cultures in death and mourning ceremonies where all the mourner’s garments would have been dyed blue to indicate suffering. This mystical association towards the indigo plant, grown in many US slave plantations, combined with West African slaves who sang of their suffering as they worked on the cotton that the indigo dyed eventually resulted in these expressed songs being known as the Blues.

Blues has evolved from the unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of slaves imported from West Africa and rural blacks into a wide variety of styles and sub-genres, with regional variations across the United States. Though blues, as it is now known, can be seen as a musical style based on both European harmonic structure and the African call-and-response tradition, transformed into an interplay of voice and guitar.

In particular, no specific African musical form can be identified as the single direct ancestor of the blues. However many blues elements, such as the call-and-response format and the use of blue notes, can be traced back to the music of Africa.

The musicals forms and styles that are now considered the “blues” as well as modern country music arose in the same regions during the 19th century in the southern United States. Recorded blues and country can be found as far back as the 1920s, when the popular record industry developed and created marketing categories called “race music” and “hillbilly music” to sell music by blacks for blacks and by whites for whites, respectively. At the time there was no clear division between “blues and “country”, except for the ethnicity of the performer, and even that was sometimes documented incorrectly by record companies.